Saturday, October 15, 2016

Top photo: Then-Secretary Hillary Clinton
taking part in the ringing of the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange
in September 2011. [Notice the fucking smile on the cunt's face.]

A top aide calculatingly
inserted a passage critical of the financial industry into one of Hillary
Clinton’s many highly-paid
speeches to big banks, “precisely for the purpose of having something we
could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two
years to all those fat cats,” he wrote in an email posted
by Wikileaks.

In late November 2015,
campaign speechwriter Dan Schwerin wrote an email to other top
aides floating the idea of leaking that passage, which had come in a
speech Clinton gave to Deutsche Bank in October 2014 in return for $260,000.

“I wrote her a long riff about
economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way,” for that
purpose, Schwerin wrote. “Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing
this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when
people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from
bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to
power.”

Another email, from among the thousands posted by Wikileaks over
the past week from Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s Gmail
account, shows how panicked members of the Clinton campaign intervened at the
last minute to cancel a paid Bill Clinton speech to Morgan Stanley because it
was timed too close to the launch of her campaign — against the initial wishes
of the candidate herself.

In the passage that Schwerin
wanted to leak from Clinton’s speech to Deutsche Bank, she quoted Chicago
Mercantile Exchange president Terry Duffy warning
that “some Wall Streeters can too easily slip into regarding their work as a
kind of moneymaking game divorced from the concerns of Main Street.”

In his email to his fellow
aides, however, Schwerin recognized that the press response might not be
entirely in the campaign’s favor. “Downside would be that we could then be
pushed to release transcripts from all her paid speeches, which would be less
helpful (although probably not disastrous). In the end, I’m not sure this is
worth doing, but wanted to flag it so you know it’s out there.”

Clinton Press Secretary Brian
Fallon liked the idea, noting that a few outlets including the Associated Press
and the New York Times were starting to write articles about Clinton’s Wall
Street relationship. “I think we could come up with a vanilla characterization
that challenges the idea that she sucked up to these folks in her appearances,
but then use AP’s raising of this to our advantage to pitch someone to do an
exclusive by providing at least the key excerpts from this Deutsche Bank
speech,” he wrote back. “In doing so, we could have the reporting be sourced to
a ‘transcript obtained by [news outlet]’ so it is not confirmed as us
selectively providing one transcript while refusing to share others.”

Mandy Grunwald, a senior
adviser to the campaign, worried that a strategic leak would backfire because
the Deutsche Bank passages were not harsh enough and people would start looking
for other speeches: “I am concerned that the passage below will exacerbate not
improve the situation.”

The leak never happened, and
the speech remained secret until one hacked Podesta email turned out to include
an 80-page
list of what the campaign viewed as potentially damaging excerpts from
Clinton’s paid speeches.

The way Bill Clinton’s paid
speech was cancelled is described in a separate email exchange. In early March,
Robby Mook sent an email to Clinton aides with the subject line “WJC Speeches”
noting that “Morgan Stanley is coming down” — an apparent reference to the
cancellation of a Clinton speech at Morgan Stanley.

Hillary Clinton aide Huma
Abedin asked if the campaign was involved in the cancellation. When Mook
noted that Podesta had intervened, Abedin protested that Hillary Clinton
disagreed with the cancellation and that she would lie to her about the reason.

“HRC very strongly did not want
him to cancel that particular speech,” she wrote. “I think if John is getting
involved in this scheduling matter, he must feel strongly. I will have to tell
her that WJC chose to cancel it, not that we asked.”

Mook wrote back to Abedin
seeking to justify the move: “Yes the issue is that if we’re announcing on the
12th/13th and he’s speaking to a wall street bank on the 15th, that’s begging
for a bad rollout.”

Seven hours later, Abedin wrote
back insisting again that Hillary Clinton did not want her husband to cancel
the paid speech: “John and Robby — HRC is reiterating her original position.
She does not want him to cancel.”

Mook then put his foot down,
and launched into a long explanation of why Bill Clinton should not do the event
— a notably political, not principled, objection.

“I know this is not the answer
she wants, but I feel very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake — the
data are very clear on the potential consequences. It will be three days after
she’s announced and on her first day in Iowa, where caucus goes have a sharply
more negative view of Wall Street than the rest of the electorate. Wall Street
ranks first for Iowans among a list of institutions that ‘take advantage of
every day Americans’, scoring twice as high as the general election
electorate,” Mook wrote.

Seeking to cushion the blow, he
noted that he understood the hardship it would put on the Clintons — who
are multimillionaires.

“I recognize the sacrifice and
dissapointment [sic] that cancelling will create, but it’s a very consequential
unforced error and could plague us in stories for months. People would
(rightfully) ask how we let it happen,” he wrote. “I would suggest that if she
is determined to keep this speech that she talk with John becuase [sic] this is
a very big deal in my view. Let me know if I can provide more information or
otherwise be helpful.”

A day later, Abedin wrote back,
noting that her boss had given in: “Robby — Just raised with her again. We are
good to cancel esp if WJC is ok with it. Just needed a cool down period.”

The identity and motive of the
hacker who gave these emails to Wikileaks is a subject of debate. U.S.
intelligence agencies have declared — without providing any public evidence —
that the Russian government was involved. And the Clinton campaign has
similarly declared that the Russian government is doing this to support Donald
Trump. All we know for sure, however, is that there have been no similar
releases of hacked emails from the Trump campaign, and that thus far no
evidence has emerged that would call into question the authenticity of any
of the documents posted by Wikileaks.

Here is the full text of the
“long riff” from the Deutsche Bank speech Schwerin said he wrote with future
readers in mind:

…Now, Jacques was talking about
Eleanor Roosevelt, and I hope a lot of you have seen the extraordinary Ken
Burns documentary series on PBS about the Roosevelts. It’s just riveting. And
you should see it if you haven’t, because it tells stories and shows pictures
that have never been seen before of Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and
Eleanor Roosevelt.

But Eleanor Roosevelt in
particular is someone that I admire as one of my predecessors, and I adore the
book that Jacque’s mother-in-law has written about the relationship that she
and her late husband, who was Eleanor’s personal physician, had with Eleanor
Roosevelt.

And you look at the documentary
and you really are struck once again how every generation has to do what it can
to make sure that economic opportunity is broadly shared and upward mobility
remains at the core of the American dream and experience.

I mean, Teddy Roosevelt said it
well. His commonsense slogan, the square deal, captured the American
imagination and still resonates today.

Just think about the changes
that were going on at the turn of the last century: technological
transformation, growing economic inequality, the steady accumulation of vast
power and wealth in the hands of a select few.

Roosevelt was a Republican from
the party of big business, but he resisted both the elites who sought to
protect their gilded age advantages and the rising tide of populist anger that
threatened to sweep the nation. Instead, he stood up for the level playing
field, no special deals, just a fair shot for everybody willing to get out
there and work hard.

I think that’s a message worth
recalling today when so many hardworking American families, and I add European
families feel like they’re falling further and further behind, while they see,
in their view, the playing field becoming more unlevel, and feeling as though
it doesn’t matter how hard they work because the game is rigged against them.

Now, to me this is not just
about fairness, although I think that’s an important principle. We now know,
based on research done by the IMF and others, that income inequality holds back
growth for the entire economy. There is no more important driver of growth
around the world than the purchasing power of American consumers. That is once
again becoming clear as we move forward more dynamically than a lot of our
friends and allies are economically.

Stagnating wages translate into
fewer customers, and that’s not a new insight. Just ask Henry Ford who first
articulated it.

And it’s no surprise that many
Americans feel frustrated, some even angry, as you probably see in news
coverage. And a lot of that anger has been directed at the financial industry.

Now, it’s important to
recognize the vital role that the financial markets play in our economy and
that so many of you are contributing to. To function effectively those markets
and the men and women who shape them have to command trust and confidence,
because we all rely on the market’s transparency and integrity.

So even if it may not be 100
percent true, if the perception is that somehow the game is rigged, that should
be a problem for all of us, and we have to be willing to make that absolutely
clear. And if there are issues, if there’s wrongdoing, people have to be held
accountable and we have to try to deter future bad behavior, because the public
trust is at the core of both a free market economy and a democracy.

So it is in everyone’s
interest, most of all those of you who play such a vital role in the global
economy, to make sure that we maintain and where necessary rebuild trust that
goes beyond correcting specific instances of abuse of fraud.

Last year, the head of the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Terry Duffy, published an op-ed in the *Wall
Street Journal* that caught my attention. He wrote, and I quote, “I’m concerned
that those of us in financial services have forgotten who we serve, and that
the public knows it. Some Wall Streeters can too easily slip into regarding
their work as a kind of moneymaking game divorced from the concerns of Main
Street.”

We heard a similar point from a
more global perspective this spring at a conference in London on inclusive
capitalism organized by my friend, Lynn Rothschild, who’s here with us tonight.
Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, offered what we in America
might call straight talk about how the financial industry has lost its way and
how to earn back public confidence.

And I think his words are worth
both quoting and thinking about. Here’s what he said. “The answer starts from
recognizing that financial capitalism is not an end in itself, but a means to
promote investment, innovation, growth and prosperity. Banking is fundamentally
about intermediation, connecting borrowers and savers in the real economy. In
the run-up to the crisis, banking became about banks not businesses,
transactions not relations, counterparties not clients.”

And then Mark Carney went on to
outline proposals for stronger oversight, both within the industry and by
government authorities, but he noted “Integrity can neither be bought nor
regulated. Even with the best possible framework of codes, principles,
compensation schemes and market discipline, financiers must constantly
challenge themselves to the standard they uphold.”

So this is a time when for all
kinds of reasons trust in government, trust in business has eroded. And I
believe that it has to be rebuilt, not only by those in offices in Washington
or Albany but by so many of you.

Over the years, I’ve had the
privilege of working with many talented, principled, smart people who make
their living in finance, especially when I was Senator from New York. Many of
you here were my constituents, and I worked hard to represent you well. And I
saw every day how important a well-functioning financial system is to not only
the American economy but the global economy.

That’s why as Senator I raised
early warnings about the subprime mortgage market and called for regulating
derivatives and other complex financial products because even among my smartest
supporters and constituents I never understood what they were telling me when
they tried to explain what they were.

I also called for closing the
carried interest loophole, addressing skyrocketing CEO pay and other issues
that were undermining that all important link between Wall Street and Main
Street.

Remember what Teddy Roosevelt
did. Yes, he took on what he saw as the excesses in the economy, but he also
stood against the excesses in politics. He didn’t want to unleash a lot of
nationalist, populistic reaction. He wanted to try to figure out how to get
back into that balance that has served America so well over our entire
nationhood.